Sleeping Dog Blog

Excerpted from Michael Alton Gottlieb's fantastic post on DailyKos:

Someone's got to tell him. There are dead bodies floating down the street.

Well it ain't going to be me.

Get Scotty to tell him.

I'm not going to tell him.

I'm sure we've all read the Evan Thomas Newsweek piece by now.

Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

You know how much he likes his vacation.

I know, but it's only a couple of days and all hell is breaking loose. We need a Commander and Chief, not a couch potato.

You're the Chief-of-Staff; you tell him.

Hey - I'm the Chief-of-Staff precisely because I tell him what he wants to hear. You think he wants to hear that New Orleans has gone the way of Atlantis?

You're his lawyer, you tell him.

I'm his counsel, yeah, but I don't see what this has to do with me.

Do you think we could get his dad to tell him?

Tell him what? Son, you better turn on the TV?

They finally told him on Thursday night.

Read it all...